


Your silence close behind

by Solshine



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss, F/M, I am so SO sorry but also I'm collecting y'alls' tears to drink over ice with a sprig of mint, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Love Confession, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss, Unhappy Ending, it's a sad tale it's a tragedy, look i want to be very clear this is extremely sad it ends badly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: Varric heads into the Fade to find Hawke. It turns out he's not as good at never looking back as he claims he is.Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice.
Relationships: Female Hawke/Varric Tethras
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	Your silence close behind

**Author's Note:**

> Started writing this in 2016 directly after bawling my eyes out at the original Hadestown concept album, and it never left me alone so I finally finished it. Sorry bout me.

_ Pour the wine and raise a cup _ _  
_ _ Drink up, brothers, you know how _ _  
_ _ And spill a drop for Orpheus _ _  
_ _ Wherever he is now… _

_ \- “I Raise My Cup to Him,” Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown _

  
  


He stays in his room for three days.

He comes out for meals, and when he does he laughs and smiles just like usual, but there are dark circles under his eyes, and he drinks only water and doesn't talk much. When he's done he smiles and excuses himself from whatever conversation someone has tried to draw him into, and then he goes back to his room.

After the third day, he goes to the Inquisitor.

“I'm going after her,” he says. Lavellan looks up from her desk and blinks in surprise. She doesn't have to ask who he means by “her,” though. 

“Varric…” she begins hesitantly.

“You can help me,” he says, “or I can get Dagna to help me. Probably wouldn't even have to bribe her, she'd do it for kicks. Might blow the roof off the place, though.”

Lavellan smiles a little. “She’d gladly do it, but I'll thank you not to ask her,” she says. There is a pause. “It's very risky, going through a tear. We still don't really understand how they work, and…” She tries not to wince. “Varric, Hawke took on that thing by herself. The likelihood—”

“I'm going in after her,” he says again. “Even if I'm only—” The briefest pause, and then he continues, voice suddenly raspy. “—only bringing back something to bury.”

Lavellan wets her lips, and then nods once. “All right,” she says. “Who are we bringing along on this excursion?”

“Me. I'm bringing me,” Varric says. “Come on, your worship, you gotta stand outside and make sure the door doesn't close on me.”

“But you're not taking anyone?” she objects. “Varric, that thing could still be—”

“Nope,” Varric interjects comfortably. The inquisitor shuts her mouth and frowns at him.

“Why in hell do you want to go in there alone?” she asks him.

Varric does not even attempt to answer. He only stands and looks at her patiently. It is a disquieting sight, Varric refusing to speak. They stare at each other for a full minute before Lavellan finally sighs.

“Very well,” she says.

* * *

They find a small, shivery rift in the hinterlands which Solas says will get Varric as close as possible to where their exit rift had been. Solas accompanies them on the Inquisitor’s insistence.

“This is a bad idea, Varric,” she says again.

“Don’t worry,” Varric says. “You’ve warned me sufficiently. You’re absolved of all guilt if I’m eaten by demons or something. I’ll sign a statement for you to show to Mother Giselle, if you like.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Solas agrees. “Physical bodies are not meant to exist in the Fade. And as a dwarf you have no experience of it, no anchor—you will be, at best, extremely vulnerable.”

“I always do best with long odds,” Varric fires back, grinning toothily. “They’re very motivating.”

“Come on, let me—” puts in Lavellan.

“Not a chance,” he cuts her off. “You’ve got shit to do out here. Besides, I don’t intend to take on any big scaly monsters that I don’t have to. This is just a retrieval operation. I’m sure Hawke is sitting on that thing’s corpse playing solitaire and waiting for me.” 

The inquisitor doesn’t laugh, just gets a pinched, pained look to her face that Varric has to look away from. He slings his canteen strap across his chest (If she  _ has _ been playing solitaire, thinks a private part of him made of more hope than he usually admits to possessing, it will have been four days of it, and she will need water) and squares his shoulders.

“Any time,” he says cheerfully.

Lavellan hesitates for a moment, and then with a deep breath, slowly raises her hand toward the crackling rift. It is strange and a little unsettling to see one of these things getting larger instead of smaller, and even in the Hinterland daylight their surroundings are soon tinged with the bilious green rift glow. The opening lengthens raggedly like a tear in fabric until it is low enough for Varric to step into. Through the rift he can see only darkness.

“Good luck,” says the Inquisitor.

“Do not be long,” says Solas.

Varric nods, and steps through the rift.

He would think his eyes would have needed time to adjust to the dim of his surroundings, but then, he supposes, it’s not real light in here, or real darkness.

All that humans tend to be able to say when they describe the Fade is “it’s like a dream,” which is oh so helpful to a dwarf. Even that romp in the half elf’s head back in Kirkwall didn’t prepare him for this; that was a stage set constructed for the kid’s benefit, but this… this is not shaped for any mortal’s consumption. This is utterly alien. It would put him in mind of the caves he dislikes so much, close and damp and dark, except that there is no ceiling. He doesn’t know what else to call the clouded, coiling darkness above him but “sky,” and yet sky is open and free and this presses down more than a thousand tons of stone could, for all that it seems so far away.

And that doesn’t even touch on the  _ sounds. _

It’s perfectly silent, except it isn’t. If humans and elves can hear sounds in dreams, just like seeing things, but nobody around them can hear them, there must be such things as… Fade sounds, magic sounds, absolutely real but absolutely unlike sounds heard with the ears. Heard, instead, maybe, with… the soul? Could they be called sounds at all then?

Ugh. This shit is much more Dagna’s speed. It makes Varric’s head hurt. But his writer’s instinct to describe the world keeps reminding him naggingly that as he walks the incessant noises—muttering, moaning wind where no wind blows, whispers in no language spoken in Thedas—are not noises in the same way, that with his physical ears he hears only deathly silence. His skin prickles with the uncanniness of it.

Wait. Not silence.

He hears… what is it? Impossibly soft. 

Breathing?

His own breathing stops, but the sound he hears continues. It’s a real sound, a physical sound separate from the ambient mumble of all the not-sound around him, that he can hear with his real ears. The sound of another physical body in the Fade.

He follows it.

It isn’t that the sound of breathing is loud, it’s just that the Fade is so absolutely devoid of other noise. His shoes against the ground or splashing in the puddles everywhere don’t quite make real-noise, but the clank and rustle and squeak of his clothes do, and so does his own breathing, and the thump of his heart. He keeps having to stop and hold his breath to reorient himself to the sound, but it’s still there every time, and he finds himself smiling as he hurries forward. He knew she was still alive. He  _ knew  _ it.

Then he tops a black ridge of stone, and the sound of his heart stops, too.

It’s Hawke, curled up on a small island of stone in the midst of the shallow waters like a sleeping baby on a pillow. 

No—more like an entree on a plate. 

Because standing with her before him is the hulking form of a sloth demon.

Varric is rushing forward before he even realizes that’s what he plans on doing, and he doesn’t know when he pulled Bianca out, but she’s pointed at the thing’s ugly head and his teeth are gritted.

He fires a bolt, but, embarrassingly, it goes wide. Is he shaking? He lines up another as he runs forward and fires. This one hits, but only in the thing’s shoulder.  _ It's a good thing Hawke's unconscious, _ comes a thought from a distant quarter of his brain.  _ She’d never let me live down this kind of shitty aim. _

The demon does not look like the second bolt bothered it particularly, but it has definitely noticed Varric now. It is turning its great ugly bulk toward Varric and he grits his teeth. It’ll speak to him in a moment and he doesn't have concentration to spare to fight off its tantalizing demonic arguments, not with Hawke lying there inert at its feet.  _ She's breathing, she was breathing when you got here, just because you can't hear her over your running doesn't mean she's not still breathing. She's just asleep, it’s just got her asleep, she's breathing, she's okay— _

He squints down the line of Bianca and fires another shot.

A hand plucks the bolt from the air.

“I don't recommend doing that.”

Varric skids to a halt. A desire demon hovers between Varric and the great mass of the sloth demon, his crossbow bolt dangling delicately from its fingers. Varric hisses and shifts his aim to the newcomer.

“I don't recommend that either,” it says coolly. “Not if you're hoping to take the mortal woman with you.”

“I may be a dwarf,” Varric says through his teeth, “but I know enough not to listen to a demon, thanks.” 

The sloth demon is still moving toward them, staring at Varric hard with its great dark eyes and Varric's head is a little fuzzier than he’d like. He closes one eye to sight the desire demon; he's got to get this in one shot. No problem, except the strange unreality of the Fade, the filter of almost-but-not-quite it's putting on his senses, is fucking with him. And he can feel at the edges the haze the sloth demon is trying to push on him, but he's not giving in, he just has to concentrate—

“But you know little to nothing else about this place, I can see,” it says smugly. 

The sloth demon behind it lurches forward, and the desire demon turns around and lazily raises a hand to it. It is halted in a haze of sickly pink magic. 

“Not enough, clearly,” the desire demon muses, unperturbed, “to know what happens to humans whose physical bodies fall asleep in the Fade.” 

Varric hesitates for the barest moment. “Go ahead and kill it,” the desire demon shrugs, gesturing to the sloth demon behind it. “I may not be able to feed on irony, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a taste for it.” It smiles at him wide, displaying its pointed teeth.   
  
Demons lie. It’s what they do. He knows that. Demons belong to a world he is happy to stay out of, one expertise he is happy to forgo. He has always left magic shit up to Hawke.    
  
He doesn’t know demons. But he does know liars.

And the thing everyone forgets about liars—the thing that makes all the best liars so dangerous—is this: 

Sometimes, liars tell the truth.   
  
The tip of Bianca droops, just slightly, and the demon’s smile widens. Varric feels like he is stepping open-eyed into a snare that he knows is there but cannot see.    
  
“What happens to them?” he asks anyway.   
  
The demon shrugs again. “It’s not really a common circumstance, to be fair,” it says. “Not a question many in your world would be able to answer, although I’m sure it would provoke lively discussion in human religious circles.” It crosses one long leg over the other where it floats in the air, like a woman on a tall barstool. Varric’s knuckles whiten on Bianca in impatience as it speaks, though his face betrays nothing. “Indeed,” the demon is saying, “It is a complicated question to answer, but let us be satisfied to say that the connection between your human friend’s body and spirit is tenuous at best right now.”   
  
Varric grips his crossbow even tighter. “I find,” he responds in a tone of voice no more urgent than the demon’s, ”that I am not satisfied to say that at all.”

The grin returns suddenly, full force. “I was guessing you wouldn’t be,” the creature says.

“Make your case," Varric says briskly, and the demon folds its hands in its lap.

“She's deep under,” it says in its smooth purr of a voice. “Her spirit is strong, despite how long she's been in here all alone, but the sloth demon’s hold on her is powerful. She must have been very tired for such a long time.” 

Varric glances over at the sloth demon. It has its tiny empty eyes on them, but seems to be held in place effectively with the desire demon’s pink magic. “If you throw the human’s body over your shoulder like a big strong hero and march back out through your rift, her spirit will have no way to follow you,” it continues. It inspects its fingernails in a charade of uninterest. Varric wonders if the purplish Fade dirt under his feet even gets under nails, particularly demon nails. 

“That body will stop breathing before you can even smell the sunlight,” the demon says. Varric tries not to grit his teeth at the thought. “You’ll never manage to get her out… without me.”

“So what do you want?” he demands. “A trade? Me for her?” He doesn't know who would ever trade Hawke for him, but he's too much of a dwarf to turn down a deal that good.

“No,” says the demon, although it looks downright delighted that he suggested it. Damn. Apparently he's not enough of a dwarf to remember to never let the person you're bargaining with know how much you want what they've got. Varric keeps his eyes from sliding over to Hawke still curled up on the ground in front of the sloth demon, but he listens very hard to her breathing.

“You catch me in a generous frame of mind—I find myself sated with souls for the moment,” the demon continues. It looks slyly at him through its eyelashes with its glinting black eyes. “I'll let you have her… for a game.”

Somehow a game with a demon seems even more dangerous than a deal with one.

On the ground, a stone’s throw away, Hawke is breathing. He can’t hear her anymore over his hammering heart, but she is. She’s  _ breathing.  _

Whatever he has to do to keep that true is worth it.

“What’ll it be?” he asks, trying not to grit his teeth around the question. “Diamondback? Chess? Tiddlywinks?”

The demon appears to consider this. Varric isn't fooled. The whole proceeding of this game, and probably his own untimely end at its conclusion, is probably printed for him to read along the back side of the creature’s great black buglike eyeballs, if he got close enough to squint and see. He isn't tempted. However this ends for him isn't important; he always figured he'd go down in an ill-fated hand of cards anyway.

“How about this,” the demon muses. Varric resists the urge to roll his eyes as it taps its chin in thought. “You take her body with you and make for the exit. I will ensure her soul is released from the sloth demon's hold, and is following behind. Her soul will make no sound, no indication that she is there, but she will follow behind as you go. If you make it back out into your world, she will awake, her soul joined back to its shell no worse for the separation.” 

A terrible smile begins to curl the corners of the demon’s mouth the way a fire curls the corners of a burning page.

“However,” it continues, “if you look behind you to see her before you emerge from your rift, her soul will stay with me.”

Varric takes a moment to think about this. It's a neat little package, he has to admit. He isn't quite sure whether to say “What's the catch?” or…

“You must think I'm fucking stupid.”

The smile hasn't left the demon's face. “Why Master Tethras, on the contrary,” it replies. “I think you're smart enough to take a sure bet.”

“I've yet to meet anything as dangerous as a sure bet,” Varric fires back. “Up to and including purple young ladies with allergies to clothes.”

The desire demon tips back its head and laughs, a sound that belongs either in a well-bred garden party in late summer, or else in some unearthly foundry alongside a machine that chews up glass bottles.

“Well of course, you don't have to play,” it says.

Varric finally lets his eyes go back to Hawke.

There’d been no point to anyone following him into the Fade. It’s as the demon said: there is no precedent for what is happening here, no experts for this situation. No amount of advice from Chuckles or backup from the Inquisitor can make the choice for him. The only expert is Varric, noted authority on one Marian Hawke.

Over on the stone, her chest rises and falls, slow and even.

“I’ll play,” says Varric.

The demon steps to the side in a laughable show of permission — as though Varric world have ever let it get between him and Hawke. The sloth demon remains sheathed in shivering light, but Varric keeps Bianca pointed at it as he hurries over to Hawke’s still form. The not-water sloshes over his boots unheeded and creeps up to darken the hem of his coat.

Hawke’s lips are pink with life, and the bruise on her cheek is purple with life. He chokes on a laugh and runs his thumb over it.

“Bet you gave that thing a hell of a fight, huh?” he says softly. “You’ll have to tell me all about it. Don’t worry, I got this the rest of the way. First round’s on me when we get back.”

He feels the nauseous aura of the desire demon hovering over his shoulder, but when he looks up, it only smiles again.

“Good luck,” it says. “Make it back out into your world with her and she’s yours to keep. But no peeking!”

“While you sic all your demon buddies on me as soon as I take a step, I’m sure,” Varric says. It doesn’t matter. He’d do worse for Hawke. She’s done worse for him. But the demon only shakes its head, and its smile grows unsettlingly wider.

“No indeed, Mr. Tethras,” it says. “You have misunderstood the game. You’re not playing against me.”

The demon vanishes between one blink and the next, the space it left behind empty and mocking. Its voice speaks again, as clearly as if it were still floating beside him.

“You’re playing against you.”

Varric does not respond, and it says nothing else. The sloth demon remains immobilized, looming still and enormous over them, its empty eyes watching them hatefully through the toxic iridescence in which it is still suspended.

“Better get out of here before that thing changes its mind,” Varric mutters. “Hold tight.”

He puts one knee down on her stone and lifts her gingerly upright. Whatever it is that isn’t water is leaching up the lining of his coat, quicker and more insistently than water can. It’s heavier than it ought to be too, like liquid lead, and seems to have snuck in through the seams of his very expensive weather-sealed boots, because he can feel it dampening his toes. He ignores it, and focuses on draping Hawke carefully across his shoulders. 

“Sorry if I’m hitting any bad ribs,” he says. “You’re too big and I’m too short for a bridal carry.” He stands, redistributing his burden, and blows out a breath. “Might as well be carrying your mabari. You Fereldens are a whole nation of solid muscle, huh?”

Hawke doesn’t respond. Of course she doesn’t. Varric inhales and turns back in the direction of the rift, and a chill wind blows behind him, cutting straight through his coat. 

Or maybe it’s not-wind. Who can keep it straight? Varric fixes his eyes straight ahead, steadies Hawke on his back, and starts walking.

“Speaking of your dog,” he says, “if we don’t get back, there’s a letter waiting to be sent to Aveline saying she gets to keep him. And I’m sure you’re aware she’s been spoiling the shit outta that thing, so if that happens he’s just going to get fat. Is that what you want? A fat mabari?”

Varric can feel Hawke’s heartbeat, pressed between his shoulders. It’s not strong, but it’s there, it’s his girl refusing to die, the tide of her breathing in his ear shallow but even. He thinks of what the desire demon said to him — he tries not to, but he does anyway. This stuff about bodies and spirits and the tie between them is a concept he’s… familiar with, even if it’s a little alien to dwarven cosmology. They talk about it in the Chant and shit, but near as he can tell a body without a spirit attached is either dreaming or dead.

But she isn’t dead. She  _ isn’t, _ he can hear her heart, feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek. Which means she’s dreaming, and the Fade is where spirits go when they dream. So maybe she is here with him, maybe she really is following behind. Maybe she can hear everything he’s saying.

“I’ve gotten used to talking to you when you’re not there, you know,” he says aloud. “You’d laugh. You nearly caught me at it, in fact. Last week. Remember when you tried to sneak up on me in my room, and I made some comment about the weather without turning around?” He snorts. “I probably shouldn’t be ruining my own mystique, but I didn’t hear you come in. Nearly scared me to death when you answered.”

His shoes squish uncomfortably with not-water, the cold not-wet hem of his coat slapping him in the back of the knees. 

“The Inquisitor’s caught me at it too, I think, at least once,” he continues. “I had a tent smack in the middle of Haven — you know how I always did my best work down in the Hanged Man, a little ambient noise helps me think. But it’s a good way to get overheard muttering to you about the quality of the food or that if I don’t get another letter from you soon I’ll hunt you down myself.”

It’s easier to ignore the whispers and howls of the Fade with the real sounds of Hawke so near. But he finds himself listening to the spirit sounds too; he is trying to bring back both parts of Hawke, after all, and if her soul is behind him, maybe one of the thousand ghostly voices is hers. Is she speaking where he can’t hear? 

Maker, it feels like so much longer than three days since he’s heard her voice. 

“You know, after you left, all the way back in Kirkwall, I swore that when I got you back I wasn’t going to let you out of my sight again,” he says, throwing a cautious glance up at the swirling darkness above, as though to accuse it of intending rain. “In front of people, even. So this is really an embarrassing situation for me, that we were barely reunited and you ran straight off swinging at a nightmare demon.”

He can imagine her sheepish grin at that, her shrug as though he hasn’t been trying and failing to learn how to grieve for her for the last three days. 

“When we get back,” he says, “You’re confined to bed until you’ve been cleared by the medics, and then you’re confined to Skyhold until you’ve been cleared by me,” he instructs the air behind him. “Which will be never. Your new job is just laughing at my jokes and buying me drinks.”

He adjusts his grip on her wrist. Solid muscle she may be, but the bones of her wrist are sharp under his hand. Without Hawke animating it, this body feels uncomfortably like nothing but a burden of bruised meat and too-fragile bone. Beneath him, his real shoes scud on spirit pebbles as dark as the sky.

At what point, he wonders, does “real” become a less than useful distinction? If Hawke is following him, she’s a thousand times more real than the thing over his shoulders.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” he says, because it’s the other thing he’s imagined saying since the moment he got the news. “Corypheus. Any of it, but Corypheus especially. That’s not really how the world works.” 

He exhales, and he almost thinks he sees the breath gust from him in spidery, translucent spirals. He breathes again but cannot replicate the effect. A dwarf could go crazy in a place like this.

“The things Corypheus is doing are his own fault,” Varric says. “Just like the things Blondie did were his. Try to bear the weight of other peoples’ sins, that’s how you get martyrs.” He shifts the weight of her on his back, and a lump rises in his throat without warning. “Case in point, I guess. You wouldn’t look good in marble, Hawke. You wanna help people, you’re more use to us breathing.”

Varric rolls his shoulders as best he can and tries to time his breath to that ghosting in and out of Hawke.

“You  _ have _ helped people,” he says, his voice thicker than he wants it to be. “You’ll never know how much. None of us ever do. But you— You changed my life. And not just because of the money,” he adds, but the joke falls flat. Varric clears his throat.

“Fuck it,“ he says. “I never planned to tell you, but you have a way of changing minds. I’ve been gone on you since practically the day we met, I think.” He wets his lips. “I love you. Have for a decade.”

Varric pauses in his trek, and takes a deep breath. He ought to feel lighter for not carrying that inside him, but he has the weight of his best friend on his back to make up for it, and the net gain isn’t much. He doesn’t try to imagine how Hawke’s reacting behind him, because if he does that he’ll either turn around or go crazy. There is no hint in the surrounding Fade murmurs of her voice, her presence, but then there was no hint five minutes ago either. Just hope.

“Speechless, huh?” he chuckles, but that’s not funny either. Inside his cold, wet shoes, Varric’s toes are going numb, but he ignores it. Instead, he tightens his steadying grip on Hawke’s wrist for a moment, and pays attention to her pulse thudding one two, one two against his fingers. 

“You don’t actually have to say anything,” Varric addresses to the roiling gray clouds. “Now or. You know, later. I don’t expect—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head impatiently and making Hawke’s disheveled hair tickle his ear. “It just seemed like something you ought to know, in case you didn’t. You’re loved.” 

It’s only just before he tops the last rocky ridge that he sees the glow of the rift greening the mist, and Varric releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. 

“We’re almost there, Hawke,” he says, gripping her wrist and her trouser leg a little tighter.    
“It’s right there, I can see it. Not much farther.”

He can almost see the whitegold shine of the Hinterland sun through the rift, although it doesn’t bleed into the swirling fog the way the rift light does, ink into water. The sunlight stays, instead, on the other side of the divide as firmly as though held there by a wall, and when they step through all the mist and darkness will stay on this side and they’ll be free and he’ll never let anything lay a hand on her again. They’re so close now, Varric just a few steps away from the rift and Hawke, surely, wonderfully, just a few steps behind.

“Swear to Andraste Hawke, I never wanted anything on earth the way I want to see your face in the sunshine,” Varric says.

And that’s when Hawke’s body stops breathing.

For one long, horrible heartbeat, and then another, he thinks maybe he’s wrong. Maybe he just can’t hear it over the nearness of the noisy real world, maybe he wasn’t paying attention for a moment. But the shimmering border of the rift keeps the sounds of life and waking on the other side as effectively as it does the sunlight, and there is nothing in the murmuring Fade silence to drown out the breath that should be warming the side of Varric’s face, the heartbeat that should be faint against his shoulder.

He ought to have dove for the rift. He ought to have stuck his head out enough to call for help. He ought to have put her down to get a better look. He ought to have stopped where he stood and offered his feeble dwarven excuse for a soul to whatever demon happened to be passing.

He doesn’t.

Varric is half mad with arrested grief and three days of sleeplessness and the other half with the cold, close air of the Fade. It doesn’t matter. Nothing will ever excuse what he does instead.

He turns around.

Hawke is standing there,  _ right there, _ translucent but as real as he’s ever seen her, beautiful and perfect, spattered with gray Fade mud and demon ichor, her hair in disarray as though she’s just run her hand through it, her eyes big and luminous as the moon hanging in a window. She looks as though she has just gasped, or perhaps taken a breath to speak, but she makes no sound. She just looks at him. Her shoulders sink in a silent exhale, and she smiles. Sad. Forgiving.

“Hawke,” he breathes. 

She reaches out to him, and pushes gently on his chest. Varric falls backward through the rift.

The waking world is too loud, too much all at once, even before he hits the ground, every rustling blade of grass and chirping bird and the deafening breath of a whole world of life roars in his ears, for a moment as harsh as the sun in his eyes. He lands on Hawke’s limp body and his first thought is  _ shit, I hope I didn’t hurt her _ , but even as he thinks it he knows.

Solas and Lavellan shout in alarm and busy themselves with the body. Varric isn’t tempted to join them. He staggers back to his feet and peers into the rift — but no. Only darkness, somehow inkier and more forbidding than the dark he’d seen before going in. 

Hawke isn’t there. Where she is, he’ll leave to religious scholars to discuss, just as he leaves her empty husk to the elves behind him. Something to bury? Why did he ever think he wanted something like that?

He thinks he hears somebody say his name, but he doesn’t know who. It doesn’t matter. Varric walks away.

* * *

There ought to be dust on his things, it’s been so long since he’s seen them, except it’s only been a day or so. Everything is just as he left it: his chair askew at his desk, an unfinished letter in an envelope awaiting a seal, an unfinished story awaiting the replacement of his pen nib. By the bed, a trunk is left open, ale-stained papers and books and battered personal effects in disarray within.

Varric stands in the doorway and looks at nothing for a moment. Then, closing the door, he walks to the desk and picks up the story. He taps it on the desk once, twice, neatening the edges, and takes it over to the trunk. The story is laid on top, the trunk is shut.

Varric walks to his desk and sits down. The sun casts yellows slivers of light through his closed shutters, striping the room like lined writing paper, dark and light and dark again. He picks up his pen, with its broken nib.

He sits there, without moving, as the room grows dark.


End file.
